


Aspidistras Among the Orchids

by Empy (Empyreus)



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: Alcohol, Alien Sex, Aliens, Desire, Dreams, Drinking, Drunkenness, Established Relationship, F/M, Flowers, Insomnia, Longing, Lovesickness, M/M, Melancholy, Memories, Outer Space, Regret, gentle humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-20
Updated: 2003-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empyreus/pseuds/Empy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ford was the aspidistra among the orchids.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aspidistras Among the Orchids

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Meg

Sometimes, Arthur had twisted in bed at night and stared at the ceiling. (Or, rather, tried to stare at the ceiling but failed since he could only stare upwards in the dark and hope it was the ceiling he was looking at. After what he had gone through, he rather thought one shouldn't take things like rightly aligned ceilings for granted.) He had wondered where he had gone astray. At that point, Fenny had turned over in bed and told him in the tone women all over the Earth used that he should go to sleep and stop worrying. Quite how she had done that, he didn't know, and the first few times he had actually gotten rather alarmed. Alarmed as in "alarmed that she might possibly be riffling through his mind like a secretary riffles through a Rolodex and finding some cards which just will not do".

Ford was one of those cards. He was the drink-stained, hot-pink card with burn marks and lipstick traces. The one that had scribbles all over it in cheap green ink. He was the aspidistra among the orchids -- or was it the other way around? The orchid among the-- Arthur stopped the thought rather rudely. He had no business comparing Ford to an aspidistra, or, indeed, to an index card. Ford just _was_.

And it was the way he managed to just _be_ that would not leave Arthur's mind. It had always been like that, even back before the whole Vogon disaster. Ford was suave. Ford was witty. Ford insulted physicists in a way that made Arthur's mind coil up on itself and despondently sob that it could never replicate those insults and that it should just shut down. (On some occasions, it seemed it had indeed shut down, and they had swayed home as a fused mass of drunken limbs ultimately collapsing in the hall of either house.)

What was disturbing was that Arthur had seemed to develop abstinence for Ford's company. He had fondled towels. He had tried to log onto the Sub-Etha network using their perfectly and depressingly standard television remote. And, most embarrassingly, he had dreamt of Ford.

Fenny had taken this in stride, though once she had served him morning tea with an acidic side dish of "you talked about him in your sleep last night".

* * *

Then there had been the hyperspace blip, and Fenny had un-been.

* * *

Time passed horribly slowly on the passages between planets, and as the relative novelty of selling his own secretions wore off, Arthur found there wasn't even anything to get appalled by. Apart from perhaps one thing, a thought-chain he sought to bury under some old childhood memories and a half-arsed multiplication table in a less-used storage area of his brain. Ford. Again. Stupidly named, stupidly lucky Ford, who, as it turned out, was nothing and everything what he had seemed.

Most of Arthur's memories of Ford seemed tactile, as though the part of his brain that registered memories was a bit drunk and grabby. He remembered, through an alcohol-haze dimly, that he had woken up once with his hand tangled in Ford's hair. Of course, his legs had been tangled into six feet of Christmas tree lights and his other hand numb under him, so it was nowhere near as romantic as it sounded when thought about out of context. And still, the feel of the not-quite soft and not-quite coarse hair had been the prevailing layer in that memory. He remembered a time when Ford, quite drunk, had grabbed his wrist and pressed his thumb hard to the thin-skinned inside. "Your pulse is the same as mine," he had grinned, but the smile had faded a notch when Arthur had told him the reason for that was that Ford was feeling his own pulse, not Arthur's, and he'd almost kicked himself for making that enigmatic smile fade.

Silly, all of it, he reflected, as he lay staring at the plastic roof-dome of yet another transport pod. Teen-aged, and what was worse, teenage-girly.

* * *

"There's a frood who knows where his towel is." Ford heard that about himself to no end, and Arthur, by contrast, always felt like he was rather lucky to even know where his head was on any given day.

However, on some given days even _he_ knew where his towel was. This present day, it was wrapped rather fetchingly around Ford's naked hips, and insofar it was possible for a towel to communicate any sort of emotion, Arthur's towel was deliriously happy.

Ford had a knack for that. He had a knack for a lot of rather bizarre things, actually. Some of them (like the trick with the goldfish and the seltzer water) were disturbing, and others (like just about anything he did with his tongue) were fantastic, provided of course that Arthur was on the receiving end of them.

This day, Arthur also happened to know where his own head was. It was resting on his towel, hence also resting on Ford's lap. He could feel Ford's fingers picking at his hair, and he idly wondered if he should ask about the flea harvest. In the end, he decided not to, since a) Ford might not understand, b) he might actually get a brutally honest answer.

"Ford?" he finally asked, staring fixedly at the kneecap in front of him, "do you find this strange?"

"Hmm?" Ford asked, his tone of voice suggesting that he was riffling through the more risqu entries in the Guide rather than listening to Arthur. "Strange?" he added after another moment's thought. He shifted his legs, jostling Arthur's head rather unkindly.

"Yes," Arthur said, his mind feebly grasping at passing words about commitment and trying to string them into a coherent sentence. "Do you think..." he trailed off slightly, his voice sounding very wan to his ears. "Do you think it's strange to sleep with an alien?" he finally said, the words almost colliding in their haste.

"Who's sleeping with an alien?" Ford asked, his interest now piqued. He looked around the room, as though he was searching for incriminating tentacles or slivers of cracked exoskeleton.

"Er, well," Arthur tried, "you are. And so am I."

"Good," Ford said, completely absurdly and completely truly to his style. "And it's nice, too," he smiled slowly. In that moment, Arthur decided to give up on the entire conversation. Obviously, it wasn't going to turn sensible at any point in the near future.

* * *

Arcane as it was, Arthur missed those disjointed conversations now that they were gone. Yes, there were planets where he could have an artificial Ford (or, quite frankly, an artificial _anything_ , be it a green okapi or merely a clone of a spouse long lost) built, but that was cheating, wasn't it? And it wouldn't ever be the same, either, he reasoned in the slightly muddled way of lovesick people everywhere.

Most of his time spent stranded on planets waiting for the next haul out was spent in bars. Nine out of ten planets had no concept of the trickery needed to brew a good lager, and so Arthur tried every virulently coloured drink he could find. When he was sufficiently drunk, he would look around for people (well, in most cases, just people-shaped things with people bits) that reminded him of Ford. The few times he did find one, he found he was too shy and too... well, too seemingly straight to approach them. He found himself staring into his pint of whatever it was he was trying to drink and wondering exactly what it was he had had with Ford. Symbiosis? A harmony of souls? No, not that. It had always been a little too carnal to be of the celestial type. More bad rock and berets than harps and haloes. 

Aspidistras in the middle of the orchids.

Bloody aspidistras, he thought. They insinuated themselves everywhere in his thoughts, and he didn't quite know why. As he followed the veering thought, picking up fragments of memory here and there, he remembered. The hothouse. Of course. It had been a strange and inevitably uncomfortable tryst, one of those things you read about and tried to imagine yourself doing, but which you never actually did, mostly because you just couldn't get your leg that high up without spraining something. (Neither of them had actually sprained anything, but they had knocked over quite a few pots.)

He couldn't quite recall the name of that planet, partly because he had never seen the written form of the name and the spoken form sounded like someone saying "Sheffield United" through a mouthful of tightly packed moths and coffee, and partly because the other memories of that time trampled it underfoot. And, frankly, how could he be expected to care about the name of a planet when he was happily wallowing in memories of lewd behaviour in a greenhouse with a handsome man? 

Quite lewd, yes. Arthur wasn't uptight, but the things he had done with Ford definitely classed in the "Oh dear, can you actually do that?" category. He would have bragged about it, but as most of the aliens around him had different standards and didn't think anything that didn't involve a canoe and six kumquats to be anything special, he refrained from doing it.

Personally, he thought that when you had Ford, kumquats were very, very unimportant. 

Thanks to Ford (and, more specifically, Ford's hands and tongue), Arthur had had a long and one-sided conversation with God in the greenhouse, one mostly consisting of various interjections, some of which he made up as he uttered them. Ford had been curiously silent, as he always was, save for a few muttered words in a language Arthur wasn't even sure was legal. 

His legs gave a little twitch at the memory. Whatever Ford had said then had done (and still did) strange things to him. His brain seemed to melt into a happy little puddle that was content with blowing bubbles all day. Back in the greenhouse, the bubbles had been the immediate prelude to synaptic fireworks that nearly blinded Arthur and also set off a series of rather pleasant convulsions.

Ford had tucked a broken-stalked orchid behind Arthur's ear before they stealthily exited the greenhouse, and Arthur had felt foolish. He had half expected Gaugin to rush over and drape him in a sarong before thrusting a fruit basket into his arms.

* * *

"Thank you, Mr Dent," the tall three-armed alien said, swaying lightly from side to side. "We are very thankful for your contribution to the artificial memory bank."

Arthur, who wasn't looking directly at the alien, gave a wan smile and nodded. His knees were having issues with the whole idea of supporting his weight, no doubt because of the cramped position he had been in inside the measuring pod. His head felt a little light, but he supposed that could be because of the lack of oxygen in the air of the lab. It wasn't remorse, he told the little voice in his head that was currently shouting about the Nile. (Or was it 'denial'?)

"Can we get you anything?" the alien asked. Its third arm was making notes, while the two others clasped each other in the approved fashion of high priestesses and matrons everywhere.

"Yes," Arthur said slowly and thoughtfully. "Please get me a potted aspidistra."


End file.
